Urad dal Laddo/ Sunniundalu

This is a pretty easy recipe for Indian sweets. Or so I thought until I tried it. It still is, but being an amateur and trying it for the first time had it pitfals. It is a straight forward recipe as all one had to do was roast the urad dal, add sugar and ghee and make small rounded balls. The sugar added is white granulated sugar, run through a blender to make it fine. I guess one could just use superfine sugar or powdered sugar and save oneself some trouble.

I had run out of sugar and I was trying to figure out some way to use jaggery, so I went with that instead. That's where I ran into problems. Once I added the melted jaggery to urad dal powder, it became lumpy, and I had to put the whole thing through the blender again. I use a really old and battered blender, so the ural dal wasn't ground as smooth as I would have liked it to be. The powder was not supposed to be too smooth either as it tends to stick in your throat if it is. It had to be a a little bit grainy/ sandy in texture.

The sugar is supposed to be in equal parts to urad dal but I don't like them too sweet, so I cut it down considerably.

The ingredients here made about 2o medium sized ladoos.



Ingredients:

Urad dal - 2 cups
Rice - handful
Jaggery, broken into small pieces and packed - 1 cup
Ghee (clarified butter) - 1 cup + 1/2 cup
Water - 2 tbsp to melt the jaggery

Preparation:

1. Dry roast the urad dal and rice in a skillet on medium flame until golden brown.
2. Mix the roasted urad dal and rice, put the mixture in a blender and grind on high to a sandy textured powder.
   
3. Heat the jaggery with water in a sauce pan and make a syrup
4. Mix the jaggery syrup and urad dal powder, making sure there are no lumps. Run through a blender if necesary to get a smooth powder.
5. Add ghee a little bit at a time and mix thoroughly. Take a small amount of the mixture and make small, rounded balls. Add more ghee if the mixture doesn't hold together. Let the laddoos stand for 30 minutes, so they retain their shape.

I think if you use sugar, the problem with lumpy mixture can be avoided. You don't have to make a syrup with sugar either, you can just mix the sugar, urad dal powder and ghee and you can be done in considerably lesser time.